“Fear, clarity, power, and old age are the four enemies of the man of knowledge,” don Juan explained in the famous book The teachings of Don Juan that Carlos Castaneda wrote more than fifty years ago and that today is still more relevant than ever.
Like many and many of us, I read it in my teens and it was one of the books that helped me continue to deepen my searches. I remember that one of his phrases guided me for years inside the labyrinth in which we all get lost looking for the whys and wherefores and what we intuit exists beyond the obvious. “Does this road have a heart? If you have, the road is good; if not, it is useless. no path leads anywhere, but one has a heart and the other does not. One makes the journey joyful; as you follow him, you are one with him. The other one will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you,” Don Juan explained.
In this bustling present where the offer of banal knowledge with pretense of spirituality and with promises of success, abundance and fullness filling us with noise and confusion, his teaching continues to be a good tool for practicing discernment ad nauseam.
Don Juan’s lessons returned to this present in an unexpected way. These are not only times to gestate the new. It is necessary that we recover those knowledge and tools of the past so that they have a new life, to update them and above all, to put them to work.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to share a beautiful conversation with Enrique Piñeyro. Valeria Schapira invited me to participate in an episode of her much listened to podcast Viajo Sola, and with him we not only talked about the fear of flying but about many other things that make each one’s search for meaning.
“What you learn is never what you thought”
Piñeyro is a unique person, tireless and interested in making sure that his passage through life is not in vain. He does not say it, nor do I know for sure if he carries it with a conscience, but the facts speak for themselves. gives me admiration his naturalness to relate experiences that for many of us border on the extraordinary and especially because she is one of those people who puts what they are and what they have at the service of others. Why? Because they can. And because they want to, of course. There are many who can but whose interest is focused on other things. We know very well.
In this context in which gossip and cotillion self-help try to tell us how to make our lives successful, prosperous and happy in ten tips, listening to Piñeyro is a relieving lesson. It gives me joy to meet people who teach without saying so, and to whom I sense a certain unawareness of the impact of their words and actions. Surely it is one of the keys to humility that makes people stay safe to continue doing our homework. I admire those people who do not hold absolute truths but a clear and forceful sense of the common good and a clear common sense of the good.
Enrique Piñeyro speaks with the same vehemence and passion about his humanitarian work through which he has rescued thousands of people and how to prepare the best fried egg. Many of us observe there, in the small, in what seems irrelevant, the true practical spirituality where everything we do can be sacred and transcendent. “What you learn is never what you thought”, this is also one of the most beautiful phrases of The teachings of Don Juan.
In that meeting, in addition to listening to him talk about new forms of leadership, about teamwork, hierarchies and meaningless accumulation that leads him to experience his version of “disruptive capitalism”, Piñeyro stopped at some passages from the book that they synthesize in a very beautiful way what he and many others believe about some things in life. I thought it pertinent to share it in this space.
Fear, clarity, power and old age: the four enemies to become a man of knowledge
Why are fear, clarity, power and old age the four enemies that we all face in order to become a man (in the broadest sense) of knowledge?
How is fear overcome? Facing It Why do we have to distrust clarity? Because if we do not doubt our certainties, we will live blinded. How does power corrupt us? When we think it’s ours. And old age? If it makes us feel too tired to live our destiny to the end.
Castaneda puts it through Don Juan’s words this way: “What you learn is never what you thought. And so you start to be afraid. Knowledge is never what one expects. Each step of learning is a quagmire, and the fear that man experiences begins to grow mercilessly, unyielding. The purpose of it becomes a battlefield. If man runs out of fear, he will become a crook, or any coward, a harmless man, frightened; either way, he will be a defeated man, he explains. To overcome it he must not run. “You must defy your fear of him, and despite him you must take the next step in learning from him, and the next, and the next. He must be full of fear, but he must not stop. That’s the rule! And there comes a time when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His purpose is strengthened. Learning is no longer a terrifying task.”
The clarity
[…] “Once a man has conquered fear, he is free from it for the rest of his life, because in exchange for fear he has acquired clarity: the clarity of mind that erases fear. By then, a man knows his desires; he knows how to satisfy those desires. He can foresee the new steps of learning, and a sharp clarity surrounds everything. Man feels that nothing is hidden. And so you have found your second enemy: clarity! That clarity of mind, so difficult to obtain, dispels fear, but it also blinds. It forces man to never doubt himself. He assures her that he can do whatever he wants, because everything he sees he sees clearly. And he has value because he has clarity. But all that is a mistake; it is as if he sees something clear but incomplete. He will hurry when he should be patient, or he will be patient when he should hurry. And he will fool around with learning, until he ends up unable to learn anything else. To avoid defeat… he Must do what he did with fear: he must challenge his clarity and use it only to see, and wait patiently and carefully measure before taking further steps; he must think, above all, that his clarity is almost a mistake. And there will come a time when he understands that his clarity was just a dot in front of his eyes. And so he will have defeated the second enemy of his, and he will come to a position where nothing can harm him anymore… That will be his true power.”
The power
“You will then know that the power so long sought after is yours at last. You can do with it whatever you want. His desire is the rule. See everything around you clearly and evenly. But he has also stumbled upon the third enemy of his: power!”
“The can He is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally, the easiest thing is to give up; after all, the real man is invincible. He rules: he begins by taking calculated risks and ends up making rules, because he is the master of power… And suddenly, without knowing, he will undoubtedly have lost the battle. His enemy will have transformed him into a cruel, capricious man”.
“[…] A man overcome by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is just a burden on his destiny. To defeat the third enemy you have to challenge him, with all intentions. He has to realize that the power he has apparently conquered is never truly his. He must keep himself in check at all times, handling carefully and with faith all that he has learned. If he can see that, without self-control, clarity and power are worse than mistakes, there will come a point where everything is mastered. Then he will know how and when to use his power. And so he will have defeated his third enemy.”
old age
“This enemy is the cruelest of all, the only one that cannot be completely defeated; the enemy that he can only drive away for an instant ”.
“This is the time when a man no longer has fears, he no longer has impatient clarity; a time when everything is under control, but also a time when you have a constant desire to rest. If he gives in entirely to his desire to lie down and forget, if he coos in fatigue, he will have lost the last round, and his enemy will reduce him to a feeble old creature. Your desire to withdraw will overcome all of your clarity, your power, and your knowledge of him.
“But if the man shakes off his weariness and lives his destiny to the end, then he can be called a man of knowledge, if only for those little moments… And that will be enough.”
Listening carefully to a man who embodies the fantasies of heroes and heroines that most of us have had is an apprenticeship. Reflecting on the provocations that he slips absentmindedly about capitalism, accumulation, and many other truths that we should question, is an apprenticeship. meet again with The teachings of Don Juan, as a synthesis of those who can lead a life of service, it is an apprenticeship. However, perceiving the extraordinary world of the invisible in the magical procedure of cooking a fried egg was, for me, a much greater learning.
“What you learn is never what you thought. And so you begin to be afraid, “wrote Castaneda. However, sometimes “what is learned is never what one believed and sometimes that strengthens our faith.”
So be it.
Fear, clarity, power and old age: the four invisible enemies.